Will HP really need systems engineers?
Old timers may recall when HP moved away from their Precision Architecture RISC server line to standardize on Intel.
And HP's move back then was simply part of a progression that had already been occurring. The underlying problem is that R&D to develop and maintain custom solutions is fantastically expensive, and it gets harder and harder to generate an ROI to justify it. Increasingly, if things *can* be done with off the shelf components, they are, because it's cheaper.
The model for the future might just be Visio, the TV maker who recently expanded ito PC products. Visio outsourced a good deal of the systems design to its manufacturing partners, and spent a lot of time talking to Intel about hardware and Microsoft about software before proceeding. They told their partners "These are the products we want to make, and the price points we want to hit. You tell us how this should be done."
Visio is essentially a marketer and packager. Their design efforts are concentrated on what the product looks like to the buyer, not on what's under the hood.
HP wants to emulate IBM and move more towards a software and services model, and while they have decided to retain their PC operations, they are looking at ways to move up the value chain and provide products for which they can charge a higher price and make a better margin. I'm willing to bet the peiople they will want will be industrial designers doing packaging, and not systems engineers. Systems engineering can be done by people at HP's manufacturing partners, with HP providing specs for what they want the design to do. HP might have an experienced system engineer or two helping to develop the specs, simply to insure the specs are reasonable and can be met by the partners at the desired cost levels, but they won't need to do the detailed design.
Given the direction HP is going (and the industry as a whole is going), why *will* they need systems engineers?

That's probably one of the reasons why HP PC's are cheap and have poor quality. I bought an inexpensive HP desktop in 2008. Within a year, the SD card reader stopped working. Then the DVD player/burner went bad. Then the hard-drive connector became loose. I'm still using it, but have to keep the computer case open, so I can re-plug the connector now and then. I am very, very, disappointed with the HP brand.
Why can't HP produce high-quality PC's, and sell them at a premium price? It can't win the race to the bottom.

Doesn't take a genius to see the writing on the wall: consumer systems are going towards lower performance very integrated SIP-based designs. When the current generation of HP systems engineers retire, they aren't going to be replaced.

These are sad days. I'm 49( feel like 22 ). I grew up in a small rural town. Fairly poor. Self taught in electronics until I went to college for EE then onto Qualcomm,Microchip,Hypercom,Sicom/Intersil, now gov.contract R&D. The ability to be versatile and do HS/SW/Embedded/Machining is gained through experience. Most kids don't seem to have that homegrown hands-on attitude( excepting the Arduino prodigy's :-)many 3rd world country kids have to create just to get access to engineering and it puts them ahead. Playing in all these fields is what leads to the years of experience gained by these older system designers. I often see management cutting to the bone and hacking out these guys for newer grads, so it's nice to hear HP is forward thinking not only of profit, but quality and longevity of products. Sometimes pride and quality of product needs to be put ahead of bean counting, otherwise planes fall out of the sky. OEM.

Guess that makes me one of the REAL dinosaurs. If one were to restrict the definition of "systems engineer" to someone who writes the system specification in a purpose-built tool like DOORS, then follows through to verify that those specs are correctly implemented through testing, there are few of us left indeed. I guess I "cut my teeth" in the Reagan defense buildup that ended the Cold War, some of us were "hiding out" in commercial avionics because it's just about impossible to get a design certified through the higher levels of DO-178 without us. Problem is there isn't much going on in the latter field between the horrible economy and the president badmouthing the people who use business jets. It's my opinion that it's mainly in safety-critical fields certified to a written standard that system engineers are correctly perceived to earn their keep, since in more competitive environments management still gets to retain the prerogative of changing nearly all the specs the day before delivery and cite "competitive pressures". Do that on a 3-5 year DO-178 project and you'll lose both your shirt AND your customer!

This article is very inaccurate. I know an engineering manager in hardware at HP that actually has the exact opposite problem: they are actively (and have been) hiring college hires for years, and they are missing experienced engineers for mentoring and other work. I think he takes a very small view of a company and uses it for the authors point.
And no, I am not employed at HP not do I desire to be.

What do Facebook, Amazon, and Google have that Microsoft, Dell, HP, IBM don't have that attracts these systems engineers? Upside potential in financial compensation (salary, bonus, stock incentives). They also have less "paleo" cultures as they're not old, stogy, mature companies that younger engineers don't want to work for. The culture's a bad fit.
What kind of education background is needed for a systems engineer today? A BS CPE probably won't even be enough to get you an entry level position pretty soon as you just know the basics but it'd be 3-5 years before they'll have trained you to really get nominal productivity from you.
I suspect you'll need a MS degree in some specialized area they're looking to fill to get hired. By then you'll be an indentured servant to $150k in student loan debt, so the only way out of that is the upside potential of sweat equity in a fast growing business.

In conjunction with unveiling of EE Times’ Silicon 60 list, journalist & Silicon 60 researcher Peter Clarke hosts a conversation on startups in the electronics industry. One of Silicon Valley's great contributions to the world has been the demonstration of how the application of entrepreneurship and venture capital to electronics and semiconductor hardware can create wealth with developments in semiconductors, displays, design automation, MEMS and across the breadth of hardware developments. But in recent years concerns have been raised that traditional venture capital has turned its back on hardware-related startups in favor of software and Internet applications and services. Panelists from incubators join Peter Clarke in debate.